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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deset Gled" data-source="post: 8173727" data-attributes="member: 7808">It's smart because the psuedo-randomness makes people think it's fair, when it's trivial for those in charge to manipulate the outcome.Choosing any system like this gives the appearance of randomness.  But the outcome of any such system is 100% known ahead of time.  Thus, those in power can choose which "random" system they want, and effectively choose the results.  In D&D terms, it would be like letting your wizard roll 5d6 for each of their fireballs at the start of the session, letting them know how many hit points the monster has, then allowing them to choose which of their 5d6 rolls they want to use against each enemy.  Sure, there was a random dice roll at some point, but the player will always pick the fireball with the exact damage the need to win each encounter, easily manipulating to get outcome they want.In the situation BTT gives, the superintendent could have chosen by alphabetical name of the school, alphabetical name of the principal, by age of the building, distance from the center of town, or any other system to appear random, but at the end of the day they were knowingly choosing which schools got the vaccine first and which got it last. There was nothing actually random about the order. Anyone who thought it was fair because of randomness was being played, and that's well before you even get into the discussion of whether or not random distribution is actually equitable.</blockquote>

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